


The Gallery

by friendofours



Category: One Direction (Band)
Genre: Beauty of Life, Gen, Harry Styles Loves Louis Tomlinson, Harry's POV, Life and Love, Oneshot, Self-Reflection, Short Story, just me using big words to convey my thoughts and feeling ok, life and death, meaningful, spirituality
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2021-02-19
Updated: 2021-02-19
Packaged: 2021-03-15 16:54:39
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,054
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29562204
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/friendofours/pseuds/friendofours
Summary: The cycle of life and death is a familar thing to anyone, except Harry. The fates took him in as an experiment, to test the strength of will and mind and love. And if they're little experiement showed them anything, it's that no one can overestimate the power of love, in all it's glorious forms. Whether they be through art, trade, or relationship. OR a oneshot where Harry retells what it was like to live a life and then come back to do it again, even with half of him gone.-------Inspired by:- The Old Man And The Sea  by Ernest Hemingway- Still Life With Tornado  by A.S. King-  The Fault In Our Stars  by John Green- HS1 and HS2
Relationships: Harry Styles/Louis Tomlinson





	The Gallery

The sun was rising.

It took it's time as it slowly reached out with it's angelic hands and sprinkled the perspiring morning earth with golden light. The flowers in the garden awakened, turning to face their great bright beacon of life and unfurled their petals to receive all that it offered.

Among the flowers was a man. He sat in the damp grass, facing the sun with his sea foam green eyes closed, a peaceful smile on his face. He felt the warmth of it's rays against his skin, gentle and mild. The salty morning breeze wafting up from the sea played through his unruly auburn curls, which were overdue for a trim. Everything was quiet apart from the tits and chaffinches that trilled and flitted about, commiserating together before all the other creatures stirred from their sleep and began the chore of living.

But unlike many others, the man sitting in the garden was not skilled in doing chores. He had figured out many years ago - possibly through trial and error, or some sign from a deeper sense of self - that no matter how hard he worked, he got nowhere. Perhaps it is something every artist discoveres in the end; that not one stroke of a pen or brush or finger on strings or keys can fully encapsulate the feeling of sadness. The feeling of pain. Or the feeling of true happiness.

Either that, or perhaps what he had really come to know was that he would never be capable of truly experiencing any of those things, and that no form of expression could bring him to do so. That he himself might not be the one able to thaw the numbness that had enclosed his heart. And if that was so, who?

The man did not know. All he knew in that moment, where he sat facing the rising sun, was that his name was Harry, and he was a secret-keeper. 

“My name is Harry and I am a liar.” He said out loud. The birds startled, the flowers swooned in another gust of wind. The quiet went away.

\-------

By nine o'clock that morning, Harry was at the wharf. The ocean waves reared up at the whim of a foreign gravity before exploding against the rocks of the beach to the south, sending their salty spray into his face. He breathed it all in, gazing resolutely out toward the glowing blue line that seperated the vast waters from the sky. The line the sun was steadily beginning to distance itself from as morning took over the town.

There were other people at the wharf, bringing in their boats from early-morning fishing expeditions, already having been working for hours and only now starting to wake up as they carried their loads out of their boats and into their trucks to sell. They did not talk to Harry; but they never talked to him anymore. No one did.

Harry's boat was small, and old. There was a white horse painted on the side of it, though it was so faded anyone else wouldn't be able to make it out. That wasn’t going to last, though.

Harry hauled his boat up onto the shore, until the small but still quite heavy metal vessel rested on the sand, tilting sideways so that the washed-out horse lay fully exposed and basking in the sunlight. Wiping the sweat from his forehead, Harry knelt down beside his boat and pulled from his satchel a small pail of white paint and a brush, then set to work.

As he stroked the smooth metal with the tip of his brush - though he thought of it as a blade more than a brush; art, after all, is just a backward form of destruction - memories began to seep into his mind, regardless of whether or not they were wanted. Memories of his childhood; of growing up, of laughing with his sister, and riding on the backs of strong, galavanting horses. The feeling of freedom as he rode those horses through marshes and forests and tall grasses, never needing to stop, returned to him as he coating a brand new layer of history onto the side of the boat. A brand new layer of sadness, too.

“And how did the angels grant your wish, for the softness of hand to create something so beautiful?”

Harry whirled around, surprised to hear a voice so nearby and actually directed toward him. It scared him, to be confronted after not existing for so long. "What?"

The person talking to him was an old man. He was tall and broad, and must have been quite fit in his earlier years. His white-streaked grey hair was thick and wild with a youth he no longer possessed, but the juvenile freshness in him had been replaced by a hard, wise, almost invincible-seeming demeanour that made Harry feel a partial need to bow down to him.

"Your talent reminds me of Heaven," The man rephrased. “Not that I’ve been there before, of course,” he chuckled.

Harry stared at him for a long moment. He considered the old man’s words. Tried to gain as much sense from them as he could. He couldn't remember the last time someone had complimented him honestly. He knew it was his duty to give an honest answer.

"I have." He said slowly, looking up into the strangers eyes.

The old man smiled. It was a kind, warm smile, that crinkled up his tanned face. But Harry would be naive not to notice the sadness and confusion that was blended in as well.

"I’d never understand, then, why you chose to come back here." He said. Then, shaking his head, he turned around and walked away.

Harry went back to working on the horse. He knew why he’d chosen to stay, of course, and he also knew that whoever that man was he could never understand. There are some things in life, after all, that just don’t make sense to anyone except you. To you, nothing would make sense any other way.

But if there was anything in that moment that made not even the smallest amount of sense, it was the tiny voice in the back of his head that kept telling him that the old man who had spoken to him was not a stranger.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thanks for reading!! I will write more later, I promise :)


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